When Aleander was in the Netherlands, before attending the Diet of Worms he secured the burning of eighty Lutheran and other books at Louvain;[236] and when he came back ten months later, he had regular literary _auto-da-fés_. On Charles' return from the Diet of Worms, he issued a proclamation to all his subjects in the Netherlands against Luther, his books and his followers, and Aleander made full use of the powers it gave. Four hundred Lutheran books were burnt at Antwerp, three hundred of them seized by the police in the stalls of the booksellers, and one hundred handed over by the owners; three hundred were burnt at Ghent, "part of them printed here and part in Germany," says the Legate; and he adds that "many of them were very well bound, and one gorgeously in velvet." About a month later he is forced to confess that these burnings had not made as much impression as he had hoped, and that he wishes the Emperor would "burn alive half a dozen Lutherans and confiscate their property." Such a proceeding would make all see him to be the really Christian prince that he is.[237] Next year (1522) Charles established the Inquisition within the seventeen provinces. It was a distinctively civil institution, and this was perhaps due to the fact that there was little correspondence between the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions in the Netherlands; but it must not be forgotten that the Kings of Spain had used the Holy Office for the purpose of stamping out political and local opposition, and also that the civil courts were usually more energetic and more severe than the ecclesiastical. The man appointed was unworthy of any place of important trust. Francis van de Hulst, although he had been the Prince's counsellor in Brabant, was a man accused both of bigamy and murder, and was hopelessly devoid of tact. He quarrelled violently with the High Court of Holland; and the Regent, Margaret of Austria, who had resumed her functions, found herself constantly compromised by his continual defiance of local privileges. He was a "wonderful enemy to learning," says Erasmus. His colleague, Nicolas van Egmont, a Carmelite monk, is described by the same scholar as "a madman with a sword put into his hand who hates me worse than he does Luther." The two men discredited the Inquisition from its beginning. Erasmus affected to believe that the Emperor could not know what they were doing.